where the two cultures meet

Queer Monster

Nineteenth Century ideas of evolution and development form the basis of many artistic fantasies. This year’s video work by Alex Da Corte is called “Slow Graffiti” and mixes many of them: psychological, embryological and hierarchical.

It seems to be far from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein fantasy. Mary Shelley’s monstrous allegory is approaching its 200th birthday and the story remains darkly resonant with artists and scientists alike.

When you’re gay and grow up feeling like a hideous misfit, fully conscious that some believe your desires to be wicked and want to kill you for them, identifying with the Monster is hardly difficult.

But for the original Monster, being scary is always coupled with being sad. This melancholy is captured in Da Corte’s new film “Slow Graffiti,” which premiered in Vienna this summer.

Da Corte recaptures the fact that the Monster’s rage lies in his anger from being abandoned and isolated. He is heartbroken. The video is an experiment in empathy for the supposedly unlovable, continuing the queer tradition of sympathy for the Monster: “Man will not associate with me.” Da Corte’s video fixates on odd dislocations of intimacy.

We-Heart.com magazine says that the show is ‘A riot of ‘perfect’ pop culture references, Da Corte’s installation sees a video screened every 20 minutes in a seating area — a shot-for-shot remake of Jørgen Leth’s 1967 short The Perfect Human (1967), featuring the artist masked as Boris Karloff and Frankenstein’s monster set to a score by Devonté Hynes; lending an unease to the artist’s disjointed wasteland of Instagrammable aesthetic. The contemporary desire for perfection … we’ve created a monster.’